(I John 2:18-25)

May 16, 1948

During the recent war I was thrilled on a number of occasions to read about the building of chapels and churches by soldiers, sailors and marines in out of the way places all over the world, wherever they went on their campaigns.

I remember two accounts particularly well. One told of a group of Air Force men in North Africa who spent their free time gathering stones from the desert and erecting with their own hands a memorial chapel to honor their fallen comrades. The other story was about the building of a church in New Guinea by G.I.’s who did all the work, using materials found readily at hand in the jungle, and when the structure was complete the soldiers presented it to the native Christians.

Our soldiers and sailors have set us a good example. This is exactly the task confronting sincere Christians in our troublous times. We must build a new church and give it to our world for its saving.

There are two truisms of our day concerning the church which are ever so patent, so oft repeated, that one hesitates to mention either or both again. Yet, so little serious consideration has been given by rank and file church people to the implications of either dictum that it is imperative that the changes be rung over and over and over.

First, it has been repeatedly affirmed that the Christian church is the only quarter to which our decadent civilization can turn in hope for help and salvation in these times.

Second, it is also repeatedly affirmed by the most competent critics and the best friends the church has that she is in her present state a hopelessly impotent body, incapable of serving God’s saving purpose in this world crisis.

In the autumn of 1946 I attended a dinner party at which the guest of honor was a distinguished physicist. He had worked at Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project, and was recently returned from making scientific observations at the Bikini Atoll “Operation Crossroads.” The conversation at that dinner, of course, revolved about the momentous subject of atomic power. I understood little of the famous physicist’s remarks that night and remember even less at this moment. But one impression remains clearly and unforgettably with me; it is the memory of a quiet, competent man, who knew about atomic force and had tested and witnessed its destructive potential, saying in all sincerity that the threat of this new-found force to man’s physical and social well-being could not possibly be exaggerated; and then soberly affirming that the only quarter to which modern man might look with any hope for an effective defense was the Christian church. Yes, this man of science said that the only power to hold in check destructive atomic power is human willpower, turned from evil to good by God’s redemptive spirit mediated through the Christian church. To ready the defenses, the physicist said, the Church had only a limited time — some five to ten years.

The number of scientific and political notables echoing this same conviction has become legion. General MacArthur started them all off with his famous declaration on the occasion of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay when he said: “The problem basically is theological.”

The editor of Fortune magazine, in January 1946, wrote: “The crisis in which modern man finds himself is spiritual. If we are to meet the challenge of atomic fission we must cure the fission that exists in men’s minds and in their hearts. The problem is not mechanical or even political, but spiritual and personal.”

Editors, senators, service club speakers, have used as their favorite post-war theme: “For the Crisis of Civilization the Christian church is our only Citadel of Salvation.” It has been a popular topic. We have heard it often.

But on the other hand, a second truism concerning the church in our time is this: The Christian church in her present state is a hopelessly divided, feeble, and uncertain body incapable of saving anything. This is not simply the slur of the unchurched or the slander of the uninformed; this is what the warmest friends and most competent critics of the church are saying about her.

Mr. Roger Babson, a keen analyst and a devoted churchman, made a survey of the American Protestant churches in 1945. What did his study reveal? Mr. Babson’s findings were published in a book bearing the provocative title, Can These Bones Live?, picturing the church in our time as a ponderous program, a skeleton of church buildings and institutions, a framework of organization from which the soul has departed and even the flesh and blood of human kindliness has been sloughed off.

Elton Trueblood sees the tragedy and impotence of present day Protestantism as lying not in its divisions, but in its insipidity. “The same kind of dull and lifeless service is repeated endlessly, whatever the occasion. We are in a time of crisis when we need a dynamic fellowship to turn the world upside down; what we are offered is a stereotype. A man, having become convinced that we are in a race with catastrophe, may seek the very bread of life, but in practice he is forced to sing sentimental songs with words he does not mean, listen to comforting platitudes and, finally, shake the minister’s hand at the door, because there is no other way of escape.” (Elton Trueblood — Alternative to Futility­)

So this dynamic Quaker despairs of the Church, as such, serving the redemptive purpose of God in our time. Trueblood’s Alternative to Futility is to pin his hope on smaller groups of sincere Christians who will take the irreligious faith and practice seriously, undergo a definite religious discipline, and work at an adventurous program for world reconstruction.

There is widespread evidence that the church people do not understand what the church is. They have misconceptions about the true nature of the church and hence no motivating idea of their role as church members. Here is a report that was made to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by its Foreign Mission Committee concerning new church members in pagan or un-Christian lands. Yet, when we read it are we not struck with how patently it describes many old time members of our Christian churches in America? “The younger churches are full of men and women whose evangelization is far from complete. They value the help of the fellowship which they have entered, and in simple ways they can carry a banner of witness for Him whose name they have taken. But that they are awake to God in their individual lives, that they know the forgiveness of their sins through Christ, are leading an inward life of trust and obedience, and are consciously drawing the strength of their daily lives from His grace, is simply not true of the majority.”

I remember how I resented a statement of William Alexander Percy, in his Lanterns on the Levee, that “the churches would not know religion if they met it in the road.” But in these critical years of challenge to the church, one begins to wonder if Percy were not right. Individual Christians here and there delight the soul with the lucid loveliness of their Christ-filled lives, but the picture of corporate Christianity, of the church as it is, is a ludicrous caricature of the redemptive fellowship, the beloved community that God wills His church to be and that the world desperately needs it to be.

Here then are two frequently expressed and commonly believed dictums of our day — that the Christian church holds the only hope for saving our fast disintegrating civilization, and second, that the church is in no fit condition to save anything. You may say the challenge facing the church today is two-fold: without and within.

Very obviously, the resolution of such a condition lies along the way of the creation of a new church, transformed and adequate, to serve the redemptive purposes of Almighty God at this crucial hour. As our American soldiers and sailors at the battlefronts, in every theatre of operations, built with their own hands their new churches and chapels to meet their present needs, so the task confronting Christendom in this momentous emergency is nothing short of the building of a new church. It is not a new denomination, nor a new sect which is demanded, but a veritable 20^th century Renaissance and Reformation.

Where must the rebuilding begin? It must commence in the rediscovery and recapture of the church’s character as a redemptive fellowship by the rank and file of church members in their local congregations. It is not to a disembodied system of dogma that men turn hopeful eyes in this age of confusion, nor is it to a vast, intricate ecclesiastical organization, already moribund with the weight of its own multiplied programs, nor even to individual Christian characters, though some “shine like stars in a dark world.” (Philippians 2:15 — Moffatt) Rather, it is to the church as a redemptive fellowship, a society of God’s grace whose members in their individual living and corporate relationships have realized the saving power of God, that we may look with confident hope for salvation in our time.

Dr. Earnest Finlay Scott, the renowned New Testament scholar, describes the nature and the function of the early Christian church as it fulfilled its destiny of being a redemptive fellowship in the crumbling pagan culture of the Roman world: “If the church was to accomplish its work for the world it was required to make itself an object lesson,” writes Dr. Scott. “It proclaimed that Christ had come to transform all human relations and to bring in an age of peace and goodwill. It had therefore to present itself as a society in which this end, which seemed utterly visionary, had actually been achieved. By following the way of Christ, a community had come into being in which love was the ruling motive; and what had proved possible on the small scale might also be attempted on the larger scale. The New Testament writers have little to say about a new social order in which war and poverty and injustice will be things of the past, and for their silence they have been rebuked by modern reformers who are more vociferous. But instead of talking, they set themselves to do something. Since the world at large would not listen to them they formed a community of their own in which the new way of living was put into practice and shown to be feasible. In so limiting themselves, they were not exclusive. They were directing the world, by the one method that could be readily effectual, towards its higher goal.” (E. F. Scott – Man and Society in the New Testament)

The church must today rediscover and recapture her original and eternal character as the redemptive fellowship of Almighty God. “Fellowship” means a company of like-minded and devoted people. “Redemptive” is a word conveying the idea of salvation or deliverance through sacrifice. That’s what the church today must be.

Let conscientious Christians then concern themselves with this most provocative problem, the creating of a redemptive fellowship.

What are the characteristics of such a fellowship? In what particulars does it differ from our currently secularized churches and their stuffy services? There is in the New Testament a short, concise treatise on Second Century Christianity which sets forth in their ideal forms the criteria of the redemptive fellowship. We know this ancient document as the First Epistle of John, written to struggling Christian communities well nigh crushed by the weight of pagan forces about them.

For the time is running out. We are dwelling in the twilight of Western Civilization. When Augustine wrote his City of God, the barbarians had already swept down from the north and sacked Rome. Augustine cried out for the establishment of the moral and spiritual principles of the city of God in the city of this world. There only lay hope. Already the barbarians of the 20^th century are sweeping over the parapets of Christian civilization. Will the church possess that inner fortress of the soul manned by the invincible guard of God’s redemptive fellowship?

“It is the last hour,” wrote St. John in his general epistle to the Christian churches of Asia Minor in the twilight of that ancient era. But John wrote, not in a note of pessimism, but rather in confident cheer, for he proceeded to tell how to build and maintain the redemptive fellowship. He outlined the criteria of the beloved community. Following John’s inspired instructions for a few Sundays, we shall do our best to learn the eternal qualifications of the redemptive community, so we may be used of God in the rebuilding of His church.

In a period of great national unrest in England, in a year plagued with war, famine, and disease, an English gentleman of Leicestershire built a church. This is the inscription of the memorial tablet set into the walls of that church:

In the year 1653 when all things sacred were, throughout the nation, either demolished or profaned, Sir Robert Shirely, Baronet, founded this Church; whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.

The best things in the worst times! In that dark and desperate year, Sir Robert Shirely did not try to get and hold and save what he could for himself and his family. He thought it a good time to build a church!

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfurl!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In (our own) green and pleasant land.

William Blake — From Milton

PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING

Our heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the remembrance of Jesus Christ. We remember that we owe to Him our greatest nearness to Thee and to one another, our knowledge of Thy Fatherhood, our human brotherhood; our new and more abounding life, our deeper and more peaceful sense of immortal life with Thee. Impress and quicken our hearts with richer memories of Jesus, until we know Him so well as He was in Galilee and Jerusalem, that we shall recognize Him as He is in this place and community, as He comes calling us to be friends with Him, disciples of Him, and His servants — to Thy glory, the blessing of others, and to the salvation of our souls. Help us, by Thy grace, that all our remembering of Christ shall be but prelude to present recognition of Him — and then give us wills to follow and love Him, who, according to Thy purpose, is the source of abundant life to all who believe. It is in the name and spirit of Christ that we pray ­­– Amen.